The two overall winners of the 2nd annual CC Swag Photo Contest are (drum roll please) — Glutinx and Tyler Stefanich. Congratulations to you both! Thank you to everyone who participated – we greatly appreciate your support. And again – thanks to everyone who helped us reach our 2007 fundraising goal!

RightsAgent, a “provider of copyright management solutions for user-generated content”, launched a little over a month ago with much promise. RightsAgent is built specifically with CC in mind and aims to streamline commercial transactions for CC NC licensed works, giving content creators a platform to “perform copyright transactions with those who wish to license their…

Check out this great YouTube clip we got e-mailed over the holidays, cut entirely of footage and sound from The Tracey Fragments. It was made to celebrate what the creator and editor, Toi Matteucci, saw as “Cinema 2.0.”, the reuse of footage from one film (in this case The Tracey Fragments) to create a new…

Craig Neilson writes about his three 2008 resolutions at WorldChanging — (1) Be vegetarian, (2) Walk, (3) Free stuff, where free is a verb: This year I want to set stuff free, which is easier than it sounds. I’m contributing to Wikipedia, publishing more helpful personal web pages and licensing my Flickr photos with the…

Although we took a little break in our “Featured Commoner” series over the holidays, we are back in action with many more stories and interviews for the new year. First up in 2008 is Hugh Hancock, Artistic Director ad Co-Founder of Strange Company, the “world’s oldest pro ‘Machinima‘ production company” and producers of acclaimed full-length…

If you remember Manu Sporny’s Intro to the Semantic Web … for noobs, released on December 25 and that whetted your appetite for something more technical, Manu has just released a video intro to RDFa, one of the metadata technologies Creative Commons is using. Like the previous video, this one and its source material is…

After an intense 3 months, the 2007 annual fundraising campaign has come to a close. And what a close it has been — $601,976 raised! The amount, however, is not nearly as noteworthy as the global participation that occurred in order for this campaign to be successful. The map above, displayed on our home page…

Author and veteran Charles Sheehan-Miles decided to kick off the New Year with an action rather than a resolution by releasing the e-book of his novel, Republic, under a CC BY-NC-ND license. From Sheehan-Miles: “…the biggest challenge most authors face isn’t online piracy. It’s not people out there diabolically copying their works and distributing them…

It’s with great pleasure to announce that the CC project in Hong Kong has entered the public discussion for their localized license draft. We would like to congratulate the CC Team in Hong Kong, lead by Dr. Yahong Li and Alice Lee (The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law) as well as Rebecca MacKinnon…

We’re very pleased to announce that pledges have been made to fulfill the Hewlett Fundation’s “5×5” funding challenge to Creative Commons. To read more about the incredibly generous support of the Hewlett Foundation, Omidyar Network, Google, Mozilla, Red Hat, and the Creative Commons board, please see today’s press release.